Naturally, there’s only one thing to do: Have a lengthy conversation aboutice-nine.

Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors, a Nintendo DS game released by Aksys Games in November, often left me baffled. On one hand, the story is so gripping and tightly crafted that I spent hours attached to my handheld, desperate to see how everything would end. On the other, some of the situations are so ridiculous that it’s hard to call Nine Hours a well-written game.

Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors is of a distinctly Japanese videogame genre called the “visual novel.” It’s kind of like reading a book with light graphical touches — mostly anime-style portraits of the characters — and sound effects. Occasionally, tiny bits of gameplay crop up. In this case, you must search around various rooms on the cruise ship and find items that will let you unlock doors.

Nine Hours is the latest creation of Chunsoft, the developer that produced the first five Dragon Quest games and is the major driving force behind the visual novel. You’ve never heard ofKamaitachi no Yoru ,Imabikisou or428 , but these light-on-gameplay, heavy-on-story titles are surprisingly popular in Japan. Nine Hours is the first of the company’s visual novels to cross the Pacific, and it’s a strange brew to American tastes.

Unlike adventure games like Ace Attorney, in which the narrative is conveyed through dialog, Nine Hours has a narrator. The bottom screen is filled to the brim with scrolling prose that tells you more of the story than you could ever see through pictures or lines of dialog.

Some of the narration is powerful, such as the sickeningly detailed description of one unfortunate man’s blown-up corpse. Other bits are less engaging, like the page-long explanation of how your main character fell off a bunk bed. Regardless, it’s a clever and unusual way to tell the story, and the narration itself becomes significant to the plot toward the game’s end.

Such a story-focused game would be worthless without a strong plot, and that’s where Nine Hours shines. Playing in the shoes of a college student named Junpei, you wake up to find that an enigmatic figure named Zero has trapped you on a cruise ship that’s set to sink in nine hours. Eight other people are there with you, and there are nine numbered doors to pass through on your way to the exit. Nine hours, nine persons, nine doors. It’d be cute if you weren’t fighting so hard to stay alive.

You’ll have to choose which doors to explore as you make your way through the ship, which means you won’t be able to experience the whole game in one play-through. Fortunately, you can skip through text you’ve seen before. Not so fortunately, you’ll have to repeat the puzzles, which are all of theescape-the-room sort.

You must dig through dresser drawers and closets to find objects you can piece together to open doors. All the puzzles follow very specific logic and all make sense — you won’t find any red herrings or non sequitur solutions.

Although none of the puzzles are particularly difficult, some of the mathematical memorization can be a chore. One room, for example, forces you to remember the exact plots of a sprawling nautical chart.

But it’s all worth the slog, since you have to complete two play-throughs to see the game’s real ending. The final sequence of events is likely to eke some tears out of even the most cynical gamer.

It’s great to see a game in this obscure genre come to the United States, and kudos to publisher Aksys Games for taking the risk. I’d love to see more developers play around with storytelling techniques like Chunsoft does here — although I could do without the freezer tangents.

WIRED Innovative narrative, mind-blowing ending, compelling cast.

TIRED Some sloppy prose, no real sense of danger, repeating puzzles sucks.

Rating:

ReadGame|Life’s game ratings guide.

• Melty Blood Sequel Comes to Japanese Arcades

• Why Tokyo Crowds Can't StopPlaying Dragon Quest IX